Paladins: DawnForge

Dawnforge was definitely a labor of love. It was one of many map ideas I helped collect and pitch to the team when we were finally able to put together a new map again. It was a really easy concept to tie into existing lore and characters, we had done so many Abyssal champions and had shown off a map or two that featured their "plane of existence". It stood to reason that the Pyre would have something similar, and with the release of Azaan it seemed fitting that he would be it's leader.

This map was a huge undertaking as we only had two environment artists, myself and Rick Ruiz, and concept/art direction was stretched very thin at the time. Rick and I both leaned more heavily into exploratory concepts ourselves, which is not typically something we do, in order to get the job done.

Overall I'm happy with the feeling we were able to establish with this map and with the amount of motion and interactivity we were able to inject into the play space thanks to working closely with our level designer Shakti Das.

I helped to design much of the architecture alongside Rick and Thunderbrush, and I built out a few pieces mostly closer to spawn but Rick modeled the bulk of the architecture. My main undertaking for this map was material creation (trims, most tileables, the different barrier materials and skydome material) and the modeling, placement and lightmapping of the daunting amount of Basalt column rock throughout the map.

The primary rock materials used in this map, the white and black marbles are either directly using, or referencing/sourced from existing Paladins textures painted by Andrew Trabbold.
VFX support was provided by Rollin Hafner
The "Pyre Sentinel" model being made by the hammer and moving on the conveyor belt was originally modeled by Denny Zunon and LOD'd by me
The Angel Statue was modeled by Steve Strickland and was LOD'd by me

https://www.artstation.com/trabbold
https://www.artstation.com/shak_das
https://www.artstation.com/thunderbrush
https://www.artstation.com/daphz
https://www.artstation.com/sstrickland